Review Summary

Todd Phillips's sparkling big-screen adaptation has a crafty, can-you-dig-it? spirit, derived from his affection for the mid-1970's cop show that inspired it and for the era itself. The original series featured a pair of apparently plainclothes cops — who were they supposed to be fooling? — played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. Mr. Phillips may not quite be a filmmaker, but he's on his way to becoming a director; his grasp of tone is a few steps ahead of his previous film, "Old School." Starsky (Ben Stiller) is probably one of those rare detectives who don't deserve the by-the-book speeches from their commanders. He is paired with another loner — cool, shaggy Hutch (Owen Wilson) — who's a step away from being bounced from the force. Starsky and Hutch are tethered to a harness of buddy-movie clichés, but their congeniality comes from the actors' chemistry, demonstrated in five previous films.
Eschewing the confrontational machismo of the television series, the movie instead plays Starsky's zealous obliviousness against Hutch's low-rent worldliness. But the movie's advertising tagline, "Starsky & Hutch — they're the Man," needs to be amended. The movie belongs, completely and utterly, to Snoop Dogg. Picking up the mantle of the police informant Huggy Bear, he is the man. — Elvis Mitchell